‘WE HAVE MORE BROTHELS THAN WE HAVE STARBUCKS IN OUR CITY.’
Takedown of Houston bordellos throws harsh light on flourishing human trafficking and the sex trade here
First in an occasional series
For eight years, the shabby Carriage Way apartments in southwest Houston concealed a brothel run by a ruthless sex trafficking ring that lured undocumented women into prostitution with false promises of restaurant jobs.
The gang-affiliated family business was allegedly managed by a woman whose sons served as enforcers and another whose children were pimps and prostitutes. New recruits, including a 14-yearold runaway, were threatened, beaten, drugged and tattooed with their pimps’ street names to remind them who owned them. One woman who didn’t make her quota was forced to have liposuction and breast augmentation.
When trafficking victims escaped their clutches, gang members crossed borders to hunt them down and force them back into service, according to sworn testimony by two investigators at several federal court detention hearings last fall.
The dismantling of the gritty Gulfton brothel and two others purportedly operated by the Southwest Cholos gang and their associates offers a harsh view of the often violent, sprawling and lucrative sex trade that has flourished in Houston in a variety of settings.
The illicit sex business here now includes top-dollar call girl agencies, legions of street walkers, hundreds of massage parlors fronting for sex shops and cantinas where a beer can be followed by a “date” in a room behind the bar.
“We have more brothels than we have Starbucks in our city,” said Robert Sanborn, president and CEO of Children at Risk.
The demand is so pervasive that at any given moment there are over 400 storefront sex businesses operating in Houston, said Sanborn, whose nonprofit research and advocacy group routinely analyzes posts on Rubmaps.com where patrons rate and review illicit massage proprietors.
“Houston is fertile ground for trafficking because of its proximity to the border, its sexually oriented businesses, its diversity and the demand for sexual services,” said Alfred T. Tribble Jr., an FBI supervisor who oversees the human trafficking unit in Houston.
FBI investigations into human trafficking have more than doubled nationwide in the past decade, and Texas has emerged as a major sex trafficking market, among the regions generating the
most calls each year to the national trafficking hotline, Tribble said.
The Cholos brothel showed how the sex trade also has sprouted up in residential areas, as Tribble’s team and investigators from the Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Homeland Security and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office would discover. Neighbors who knew about the brothel at the two-story Carriage Way apartment complex — 7 miles from downtown, 3 miles from the glitzy Galleria — were reportedly too spooked by the threat of gang retaliation to report it to the police.
Over two years, investigators tracked down evidence in Houston, the Rio Grande Valley, Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador.
The grand jury indictments — returned on Nov. 3 and Dec. 7 — of 24 members and associates of the Southwest Cholos provide a glimpse into the complex crime underworld that thrived behind closed doors. The case is unusual in that a Houston street gang is accused not only of peddling drugs and firearms but also running an international prostitution business and a human smuggling operation that transported immigrants from China across the U.S.Mexico border for a whopping $40,000 per person.
A gang dabbling in sex trafficking is not an anomaly, said Tribble, of the FBI. Gang leaders are savvy, and they often experiment with new enterprises to increase their profits, he said. ‘Use them and use them’
“Trafficking in human flesh is a lot less risky than trafficking in firearms or illegal narcotics,” Tribble explained. “The capital is abundant and renewable; people are sold over and over again.
“It’s not like a kilo of cocaine where it’s used and it’s gone,” he said. “You can use them and use them and then ship them off to another city and exploit them more.”
That was exactly what happened in the Cholos case, an FBI agent on Tribble’s team testified.
The agent told a Houston judge that several of the victims were groomed and trained at a family-run brothel in Cancun before being romanced, tricked, tattooed and shipped to three Cholos brothels in Gulfton where their services commanded a higher price.
The enforcers for the gang brothel were particularly merciless in controlling their moneymaking victims, Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Goldman told a judge at a November hearing.
“We’re dealing with a group of individuals that branded women like cattle,” Goldman told the court, adding they engaged in “exceptional violence.” Five defendants, including the pimp who allegedly ran the Cancun brothel, remain fugitives, but Goldman convinced federal magistrates that 14 of 17 defendants rounded up by police were a danger or flight risk and should await trial in custody without bond.
While some declined to comment, citing reams of documents they’d just been handed, several defense lawyers said there is little evidence to support the sweeping federal indictment and poked holes in the government’s case, including Andrew Williams, who represents a key defendant accused of managing the brothel.
Williams said his client, Maria Angelica “Patty” Moreno-Reyna, 51, had nothing to do with the scheme but got swept up in the prosecution because she lived in a gang-saturated building where a brothel was operating unchecked for years.
“Some of these claims are outrageous,” said Williams. “She’s a middle-aged woman. She has no power to make anyone do anything. They’re making her out to be a kingpin.” ‘Contrived’ evidence?
The lawyer for Moreno-Reyna’s son, Jose Luis “Lucky” Moreno, who is accused of being an enforcer, said he looked forward to his client having his day in court.
“We suspect the government’s evidence is contrived,” said attorney Ali Fazel. “We suspect that a good number of witnesses for the government have been granted a great deal of leniency and provided favors for their testimony.”
Williams agreed, saying prosecutors had cast a wide net in hopes that some defendants would be snared, a strategy he said benefited the government’s witnesses. “Some of these witnesses are going to be able to stay in this country for a long time,” he said.
The gang’s grim enterprise persisted for years amid the buzz of life at the urban apartment complex on Houston’s southwest side, according to investigators.
On a sunny morning a week after the arrests, the people at the Carriage Way apartments on Dashwood quietly tended to their lives. A woman unloaded groceries in the carport as neighbors chatted in an interior passageway, paces from where the Cholos brothel operated for nearly a decade.
A sign posted in the parking lot reminded residents to keep their radios low as a courtesy to others. The enterprising residents of a nearby apartment had set up a makeshift convenience store, with handwritten signs taped in windows advertising chips, soda and candy.
But in an adjoining courtyard, evidence remained of the recent FBI raid at an upstairs apartment: a cracked windowpane and a boardedup door plastered with an eviction notice. The scheme, officials say, involved tenants who rented 10 of about 70 residential units in the complex.
Several neighbors at the complex said they saw a team of FBI agents combing through units at the two-story complex during the first week in November. Before the raid, they said, they claimed to know nothing about a busy brothel where up to seven women provided services to customers from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m.
The building manager at the apartment complex declined to speak with a reporter about the protracted criminal enterprise alleged by police. A Houston attorney who represented the building owner in a 2012 nuisance lawsuit — involving complaints at another residential property — did not return calls for comment.
Moreno-Reyna is charged with setting up the illegal sex operation jointly with family members from the Southwest Cholos, several of whom lived in the building.
The Houston-based gang dates to 1990 and currently has about 2,000 members spread across 10 cliques in Bellaire, Fondren, Chimney Rock and Gulfton in the southwest part of Houston, according to Lt. Aaron Tyksinski, who oversees the juvenile crime division for Harris County’s Precinct 1 Constable Alan Rosen. Over the years, Tyksinski said, the gang has been linked to crimes like aggravated robbery, aggravated assault, car theft, narcotics trafficking and home invasions.
But the investigation in the brothel case uncovered a much more expansive international scheme.
During several hours on the witness stand in November, Dina Morales, a special agent at Houston’s FBI field office specializing in sex trafficking investigations, described terrifying conditions women endured at the Cholos’ brothels.
Morales told a judge that the crew’s 51-year-old matriarch, Moreno-Reyna, ran three apartment brothels in working-class Gulfton, west of Bellaire. The enduring moneymaker of the trio was the Carriage Way, which was the hub for the gang’s methamphetamine and heroin sales, gun trafficking and immigrant smuggling operation.
Moreno-Reyna, a Mexican immigrant, allegedly employed her five gang-affiliated American sons and another gang leader who was “like a son” as enforcers. One of Moreno-Reyna’s sons, William Alberto Lopez, remains a fugitive and has been accused of doling out the most brutal attacks to victims.
Morales said Lopez helped run the brothels in Houston and headed one in Cancun a prosecutor dubbed “the farm team.” Women gained experience at the Cancun business before being smuggled into the U.S. and forced to earn back their smuggling debts by performing sex acts in Houston, the FBI agent said.
The FBI agent said Moreno-Reyna’s husband and gang-affiliated brother handled the lucrative human smuggling branch of the business with crews in Houston and the border town of Donna. The smuggling team shuttled in two immigrants from China for $40,000 each and others from Brazil, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Central America, using gangcontrolled stash houses in the Rio Grande Valley, Morales said.
A colleague of MorenoReyna’s, Gabriela Gonzalez-Flores, also a Mexican immigrant, allegedly ran the Carriage Way brothel, delivering beers and condoms to patrons and collecting sex payments, with her American children in support roles. Her son Hector Reyna, nicknamed “Pantera” or Panther, was a top-ranking leader in the Cholos and an enforcer and pimp, daughter Bianca Stephanie “Troubles” Reyna was a gang member and enforcer, and two other daughters chipped in as prostitutes, Morales said. Women trapped
The FBI agent said enforcers with the gang entrapped vulnerable women with lofty promises, drugged them, punched and kicked them into submission and threatened them and their families if they resisted.
Hector Reyna, 26, allegedly invited a 14-year-old runaway to move in with him, his mother and sisters, convincing the girl they were dating. He gave her drugs so she wouldn’t make a scene and got his name and nickname tattooed on her body, according to testimony. Then he told the teen that she owed the family money for lodging, but since she was in the country illegally and a minor, she would have to work as a prostitute, Morales told the court.
Other gang members also are accused of treating the women harshly, kidnapping one from another Houston brothel and forcing her to work.
One young woman was dragged by her hair into the street when she refused to show up for a shift.
Another trafficking victim came to the brothel after Lopez seized her during a shootout with the bartender at another brothel, Morales testified. This woman was forced to get a tattoo with William’s name on it but was promised a job at Moreno-Reyna’s restaurant. She soon learned there was no such restaurant.
“William was very severe with her,” Morales testified. “He hit her, and she ran away and went back to Mexico to live with her mother.”
Within a week of returning home, “William showed up at her doorstep,” Morales said. Considerable toll
Lopez allegedly threatened harm to her family if she did not come back with him. She returned but was expected to repay her smuggling debt of $5,000. In addition, he paid for breast enlargement surgery and liposuction in hopes she’d make more money at the brothel, the agent said.
Morales said the woman was expected to pay Lopez those medical costs along with her smuggling fees, so she fled the Houston brothel a second time. Again, the Cholos crew hauled her back by force. The third time she managed to escape and get away, according to the FBI agent.
Overall, the human toll on women in the business was considerable.
The Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance, a collaboration between police and nonprofits, has identified 13 women forced to work at the Cholos brothel.
What helped the sex business and the Cholos’ other criminal endeavors thrive was the perpetrators’ friendly veneer, said Tribble, of the FBI.
“These traffickers are amicable,” he said. “They could sell you sand on the beach. They can find things out about you by social engineering, and the next thing you know … they’re threatening your parents, your children and loved ones.”
Trafficking victims were drawn to Houston looking for the American dream, he said.
It’s the same dream, investigators say, the extended Cholos crew members exploited in fashioning their own cruel scheme.